Running XUbuntu 6.06 LTS

In the middle of 2006, I read an article on OSNews.com that talked about putting new life into an old laptop using one of several lightweight Linux distributions. I gave two of them a try - Puppy and Vector Linux. However, I came to the conclusion that both distributions were not any better than FreeBSD 4.10 that was previously installed on my machine. Fortunately, around that time XUbuntu 6.06 was released.

I purchased my IBM Thinkpad 1720i in 1998. It came with an Intel Pentium-II processor (266 MHz clock), 64 MB RAM (66 MHz), and a preinstalled copy of Microsoft Windows 98 on a 4.3 GB hard disk. That same year, I added an additional 64 MB of RAM and IBM OS/2 Warp 4 for a dual boot setup. In 2001, the 4.3 GB disk was replaced by a Toshiba 20 GB disk (4200 rpm) and FreeBSD 4.10 with the KDE 3.1 desktop environment became my main operating system.

My first attempt to install XUbuntu using the Live CD failed during the file copying. The installation was very slow and eventually just stopped. I later found out that I set the CD-ROM speed in the BIOS to 'slow' in order to extend battery life. That explained the sluggish drive performance. My second attempt with the Alternate CD also failed during the file copying. I concluded that more RAM would be necessary for a successful installation. Thus, I replaced the two 64 MB memory cards with two 128 MB cards for a total of 256 MB RAM. The third attempt finally succeed. Overall the installation of XUbuntu is very easy and well thought through. Only a minimal amount of input is necessary to setup the system.

Booting XUbuntu for the first time revealed a number of surprises. Sound worked right away. That was never the case with any other Linux distribution or FreeBSD that I tried on this hardware before. XUbuntu obviously detected the Yamaha OPL3-SA23 sound chip. Furthermore, support for IBM Thinkpad keys was installed. With the help of the nicely designed Networking panel, I managed to establish a dial-up connection to the internet from home with ease. Firefox and Gaim allowed me to instantly surf the web and to chat with my friends around the world. Gaim is particularly nice. It is easy to setup, supports many protocols (including Sametime) and is a pleasure to use. My Netgear FA411 16-bit PCMCIA Ethernet card which used to work under FreeBSD was not functional. The video setup worked flawlessly but very slowly and the single USB 1.0 port seemed to be dead (even under Windows 98). XUbuntu comes with the Xfce desktop environment that features a nice and clean look and feel that I liked immediately. The system looks modern and is refreshingly simple.

XUbuntu 6.06 desktop

To fix the slow video performance, I changed the default 24-bit color depth in the xorg.conf file to 16-bit depth. This improved video performance drastically to a more than adequate level. Ethernet started to work when I replaced the Netgear FA411 16-bit PCMCIA card with a 3COM 3CCFE575CT 32-bit PC card and rebooted the machine. With a decent video setup and a working Ethernet connection, my 8 year old IBM Thinkpad started to become useful again.

Next, I wanted to setup printing but I couldn't find a printer setup dialog in the Settings Manager panel. After reading parts of the online manual, I found the solution. XUbuntu ships with the Common Unix Printing System (CPUS) and printer management is done with a Web-based application. Point your browser to http://localhost:631 in order to add, remove, change and manage printers. It works nicely. Nevertheless, a printer setup dialog should be added to improve the UI experience. I setup support for an Epson C84, Lexmark 3200, and a number of IBM laser printers. All of these printers work like a charm. Printing from the mousepad editor didn't work until I installed the a2ps package.

After playing for a while with XUbuntu, I noticed that a number of software piece were missing. The Xfmedia player lacked a few codecs and the xcalc calculator was too basic for my taste. I added the extra codecs (the libxine-extracodecs package) and installed Galculator, a nice GTK+ based calculator application with RPN support. I also added the mtools to handle MS-DOS files and Sametime support (the gaim-meanwhile package) for Gaim which allowed me to chat with my fellow coworkers. And finally, I added the Microsoft core fonts (the msttcorefonts package) to give Microsoft documents in XUbuntu a decent look. Adding packages in XUbuntu is done with the Synaptic Package Manager, an easy to use software tool that gives you access to roughly 19'000 packages.

Because adding new software packages was so simple, I decided to install even more software. I added Octave - a Matlab clone, and Gnuplot - a software for plotting graphs. I also setup a complete programming environment including make, cvs, and gcc. Adding Latex (the tetex-extra package) enabled me to compile my old tex documents that I created with my OS/2 system many years ago. The Latex setup worked as expect and the output it produces is simply superb.

XUbuntu ships with two lightweight applications which work well and cover the basic needs. Gnumeric is a spreadsheet application and Abiword is a word processor. However, I have been using StarOffice/OpenOffice for many years, starting with StarOffice 5.0 on OS/2 Warp 4, and I wanted to have access to my favorite office suite. For performance reasons, I chose the skip the latest release of OpenOffice and instead installed version 1.0.3. This release is already a couple of years old, but it does work well with my setup and allows me to exchange files with my Windows machines.

At this point, I had a nicely working setup that allowed me to do my regular work including surfing the web, chatting with my friend, writing documents, calculating spreadsheets, printing documents, etc. However, I wanted to go further and squeeze out even more performance of my aging laptop. So I started to fiddle with the system setup. I switched the harddisk access mode from 16-bit to 32-bit in the BIOS and made sure that the harddisk was running in DMA mode. This turned out to be a big improvement. Disk operations became much quicker. The throughput measured by the hdparm application reached 20MB/s. Already knowing that disk I/O would be a major bottleneck for my system, I decided to choose the ext2 filesystem during the installation for optimal performance. Another improvement came from disabling of the IPv6 protocol. Surfing the web was noticeably faster. The biggest performance gain however came from disabling a bunch of unnecessary services with the sys-rc-conf run level configuration tool. I disabled the ACPI power management, the enterprise volume management system, the HP printing subsystem, the logical volume manager, the RAID management tool, the NVidia kernel, and the graphical boot up screen. Without loosing any functionally the system speed increased considerably. I thought about using the prelink application to further increase performance, but I came to the conclusion that the risk is too high. So I will stay away from it. Currently, I am more than happy with the system speed. It amazes me how much performance you can get out of 8 year old hardware using the right software mix.

Don't throw away your old hardware! Buy more memory for a few bucks from eBay for your old computer and install a lean, lightweight Linux distribution. Such a system will be more than adequate for internet surfing, writing letters, and educational purposes. XUbuntu is an outstanding Linux distribution for older, less powerful hardware. It recognizes most hardware components, works very well and has a professional, modern look. Its Xfce desktop environment is simple, fast and intuitive which makes it an ideal choice not only for old but also for new hardware. XUbuntu's package manager gives you access to roughly 19'000 free applications. You will find everything you need. I have enjoyed my XUbuntu system for over a year now and I am discovering new things on a daily base. I thank all the people who have contributed to this excellent system.